Kanvic helps Fortune 500 client deliver cost savings in India
Through a five-step data driven intervention, Kanvic Consulting has helped a Fortune 500 company save up to Rs. 30 crore as part of a Covid-19 cost-cutting drive.
The client in focus has a vast global supply chain – large chunks of which are in India – spreading across a complex web of road, rail and sea networks and feeding exports to countries across the world. Covid-19 and the resultant restrictions on movement attacked the heart of supply chains worldwide, squeezing revenues and maximising risks for many globally spread companies.
The response has broadly been to look for cost cutting measures, and the client in question followed the same pattern. Internal efforts to identify impact areas proved less than satisfactory, and Kanvic Consulting was brought on board for its expertise in strategic operations consulting, with the aim of identifying impact areas. The goal was to make substantial savings within a tight timeline.
Five-step strategy
What ensued was a five-step process that proved highly successful. Kanvic began by “framing the issue” – the process by which the client’s exact challenges were pinpointed alongside contextual information on production facilities, modes of transport and pricing. Once the issue was clear, the second step was to gather relevant data based on the issue frame.
Step three was to “wrangle” the data, where Kanvic used advanced analytics techniques to convert vast pools of raw data into clean, structured and valuable data sets. Once data-driven insights were in place, the fourth step was to develop an optimisation algorithm, informed by Kanvic’s expertise in the business, tech, and data science fields.
The final step was to take the results from the algorithm and weigh them against the incumbent strategy to demonstrate the clear benefits. With this proof of concept approved, Kanvic worked with the client to implement the solution on a pilot basis, which according to both parties proved remarkably successful.
For one, transportation modes and patterns were optimised to generate savings of between Rs. 25 crore and Rs.30 crore. Kanvic also used advanced analytics to theoretically reinvent the client’s supply chain, pinpointing ways in which the company could save up to Rs. 100 crore annually.
Lastly, Kanvic set the precedent for the client’s broad-based use of data analytics. Having seen the success of Kanvic’s intervention, leadership at the firm embraced the potential of data analytics when deployed at such a large scale. The firm has since been looking to deploy data-driven solutions in other part of its business as well.
